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Alice in the Cities

In Wim Wenders’s 1974 drama, Rüdiger Vogler plays the director’s alter ego, Philip Winter, a thirtysomething German journalist on the road in the United States. Taking Polaroids instead of writing a story, Philip loses his job and must go home. But first, in New York, he’s thrown together with Alice van Damm (Yella Rottländer), a nine-year-old German girl abandoned by her mother (Lisa Kreuzer), whom he then takes on an odyssey throughout West Germany in search of her grandmother. With this film, Wenders crystallized his style of existential sentimentality. His cool eye for urbanism and design blends a love of kitsch with a hatred for commercialism, historicism with a fear of history’s ghosts. Wenders’s New York chapter is a loving time capsule featuring the Rockaway Beach boardwalk and the organist at Shea Stadium; his German towns blend grim industry and grubby necessity. The movie runs on American dreams; a jukebox playing Canned Heat, a Chuck Berry concert, and even John Ford’s obituary lend a touch of life to Wenders’s gray continent. In German and English.